"my house"

"Es su casa" -- "It is your house." The cab driver said this to me last week, in Barcelona, as we pulled up to the American embassy. The day before, my purse had been stolen in what we later learned was a pretty familiar scam in southern Europe -- We heard a noise in the back of our rented car, someone waved us to the side of the road and then came up to the window to tell me we had a flat tire. The purse must have been taken when my husband got out of the car to check the tire, which was not flat. We drove on, and I missed the purse only when we stopped for gas a few minutes later.

As anyone knows who has experienced it,it's a terribly vulnerable feeling - I lost pretty much everything that I was enjoying having with me for our trip - our camera and all the pictures on it, not downloaded, my Spanish dictionary and guidebooks, which helped me enjoy the adventure of exploring and coping in a language I know only moderately well (that's probably being generous), the purse itself. And of course my passport, identifying me as an American citizen and making me "legitimate" in the country. It was good I was traveling with my husband, who had some credit cards that we didn't have to cancel (all had been used immediately), and access to money. But I had nothing of my own. And I was on my own on this trip to the consulate.

Traveling always makes me aware of the arbitrariness of what I think of as necessary. There is some freedom in packing only what I need for the journey, and leaving all of my other "stuff" at home. There is gratitude in recognizing that we can afford the trip and even some setbacks. And I have a sense of adventure about exploring a new small town - before Barcelona we had started off on the Costa Brava, and figuring out how to buy water, find a cafe, make my way in a place where people's habits, money, daily routines are different from what I'm used to, and blending into that. I even enjoyed that sense of simplification that came with having "everything I could possibly need" tucked into that single bag that I carried with me at all times - passport, camera, ipod, cell phone. But now all of it was gone.

With it all gone, that sense of what I "need" calls for revision, even as I hustle, now that I'm home, to replace things -- credit cards stopped, cellphone replaced, other things I'm deciding to do without for awhile.

On this adventure, the first thing I absolutely "needed" was that passport, and it felt at the time like a really important sign of who I was in this strange city where I'd just been the victim of a crime. Without it, no one would know who I was or where I was from. And without it, I couldn't get home. "Home." That's what I needed - the assurance that I could indeed get home again.

I've never been so glad to see an American flag as I was when I saw the flag waving over the US consulate that day in Barcelona (And by that I don't mean that I am NOT glad to see American flags in general - this isn't about my patriotism -- but just that American flags aren't usually something I notice a lot). This consulate was "my house." ("su casa," the driver said). They spoke English -- they understood what it was like to lose that lifeline to home. They had heard of other people being victims of this same crime (In fact "flat tire scam" was on the checklist of ways one might have lost a passport. There was something perversely consoling about that). The kind woman behind the desk assured me, in perfect English, that they could get me a new passport that day and told me how. Then she said with genuine compassion, "It's really hard, losing your whole purse." And that's when I finally started to cry, almost 24 hours after the crime itself. And yes, she had a kleenex. And yes, it was OK to cry now. This was "my house."

A Disciple Making Church?

Also posted on Episcopal Cafe for 5-9-08



Over the altar at Virginia Seminary, where I teach, are the words from Mark 16:15. “Go into all the world and preach the gospel.” (“proclaim the good news to the whole creation” is how the NRSV has it.) These words have inspired generations of people called to the ordained ministry of word and sacrament. But as one of the people called to the ministry of teaching in and beyond the church, I find myself drawn, this ascensiontide, to Matthew’s version of the Great Commission, and I wonder what the church would look like if we spent more time reflecting on what Jesus might have meant here. In Matthew 28: 19-20, he says “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you . And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

A lot of the literature I’ve seen on stewardship and congregational development seems to focus on attracting more members to our congregations, through programs that meet perceived needs: it’s about “marketing” the church. Young adult ministries, I’ve noticed, focus some energy on encouraging vocations, but often that means raising up young people to be the next generation of ordained ministers in the church. But I have been wondering what we would look like as a church, as congregations and schools and communities, if we focused more energy, not so much on selling the church or attracting new members, but on “making disciples” of the people who come in our doors, and the seekers who inquire about us. What might this call to “make disciples of all nations” mean in our time and culture and in the current theological climate?

The term “discipleship” is probably associated, for some of us, with more evangelical and fundamentalist traditions and “making disciples” primarily with overseas mission, often associated with cultural conservatism. But I believe it’s a term that we in the Episcopal/Anglican tradition should be reclaiming, reframing, and considering in light of our tradition and the culture surrounding us. Brian McLaren, in A Generous Orthodoxy, moves in this direction as he seeks a very Anglican-sounding “generous third way” between Evangelicals’ preoccupation with a personal saviour and liberals’ with modern culture. He writes of how he muddled for some time over how to describe the mission of the Church, moving from the familiar language of Evangelicals in his description of the church. He tells how he started with formulaic language: the church’s mission is to make “more Christians and better Christians.” But on reflection he tweaked it further, moving to “To be and to make disciples of Jesus Christ” and then “To be and to make disciples of Jesus Christ, in authentic community, for the sake of the world.” I like his movement away from labels to the affirmation of discipleship as part of our communal identity and our work in the world. And I like the language of discipleship better than language about “the ministry of the laity” (much as I revere the work of Verna Dozier and others of her generation) because it gets us out of ecclesiastical categories back into Biblical language that describes the shared mission of everyone in the Church. How do we understand discipleship in our time? That’s the question we should be asking together, regardless of office or vocation within the structure of the Church.

The idea of discipleship also gets us back to the concept of our faith as something we practice – the great insight of Diana Butler Bass’s influential work. Jesus tells his followers to make disciples of all nations – i.e. not only the Jewish community that they know but ALSO all nations: this is for everyone. And it’s about observing what he commanded. Love your neighbor as yourself; pray; teach, heal, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, seek forgiveness and reconciliation; look at the world through the lens of one who can say “blessed are the poor/ blessed are the meek.” This is not about convincing people to be like-minded or to join-up, nor is it a self-help project, about “becoming a better person.” Rather, the idea of discipleship gets to the heart of who Jesus is or wants to be for us. It moves us beyond worrying about the shape of institutions and back to a focus on the mission that Jesus has promised to support, if we try to follow him: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

What would the Church look like if we thought of “disciple-making” as our core purpose, in adult formation programs, in seminary education, in worship. The language of the baptismal covenant and baptism service in the prayer book provides some good language for this, in our tradition – though somehow or other the “ministry of the baptized” has been relegated to a category that goes with “not called to ordained ministry,” in many discussions in seminaries and vocation/formation programs. (Sometimes implying a contrast between the ministry of the ordained and the ministry of the baptized, as if the ordained were not baptized!) But discipleship: that’s something we all share, whatever office we’re called to in the church – it’s something we can reflect on within our tradition and also across denominations. How might the vision of a “disciple-making church” transform and refocus our work, worship and teaching? A question to reflect on as we approach the Feast of Pentecost.